Comeback Dept.

In Tarrytown, in the early nineteen-sixties, there lived a young Brazilian musician named Tim Maia, who was destined for greatness, although few who knew him at the time would have guessed it. His living circumstances were inauspicious—he slept on friends’ couches, and a local floozy took him in for a while; and his ambition, buoyed by a passion for American soul music and knowledge of Brazilian bossa nova, seemed quixotic at best. He sang in a vocal-harmony group called the Ideals, and wrote the words to the group’s only recorded song, “New Love,” whose rhythm reflected Maia’s world-music aspirations; somehow, he had persuaded the great Brazilian drummer Milton Banana to play on the demo. But not long after making the recording Maia was busted in Daytona Beach, Florida, for smoking pot in a stolen car, and after six months in jail he was deported to Brazil. There his music flowered. One critic described his 1970 début album as a “cannonball in the pool” of Brazilian pop, and he went on to achieve his dream of creating Brazilian soul music, before dying of a heart attack, suffered onstage, in 1998, at the age of fifty-five. But his old friends in Tarrytown didn’t know about any of that; as far as they were concerned, “Jimmy the Brazilian,” as he was known around town, had disappeared without a trace.

Suzanne Vega went to see her dentist the other day, in Greenwich Village, and afterward she had a late lunch by the window at the Cornelia Street Café, an old Village haunt where she first got noticed as a singer-songwriter, in the early eighties.

The actress Leslie Caron, whom Gene Kelly plucked, in 1948, when she was seventeen, from the Ballets des Champs-Elysées and then shipped to Hollywood, where she pirouetted and pouted her way through several M-G-M classics, has grown accustomed, in recent years, to the silence of her telephone. “I was absolutely convinced that I couldn’t act anymore,” she said not long ago. “I thought, I’m this old Gigi and Lili, and I suppose I can’t pretend anymore. Nobody’s going to hire me.”